Western shakes off rust in win

By Bryce Mereness St. Joseph News-Press

The Missouri Western women came back early from Christmas break with an opportunity to shake off the rust before conference play starts back up on Sunday.

After trailing for nearly four minutes in the first half, the Griffons never looked back en route to a 65-57 victory over Newman University at MWSU Fieldhouse.

“I think its helpful,” Western coach Lynn Plett said. “Like I told the girls ‘it beats practicing today.’ So it’s immensely important. I think we practiced really well the first couple of days back, but I just felt like we didn’t really have the intensity on the court on a consistent basis tonight the way I like to.”

In a generally sloppy game, the Griffons forced 21 Newman turnovers and scored 17 points off of the giveaways. Newman dominated the glass tallying 23 more rebounds than Western and scored 15 second chance points.

“From that statistic (turnovers) it looked like we had good defense,” Plett said. “But if I’m looking at the other one they got 21 offensive rebounds. That supposes just the opposite, that we didn’t play as good on defense. … There is kind of a trade off there obviously.”

Jessica Koch paced the Griffons with 17 points including four free throws down the stretch to build the final margin.

“As the season has gone on we kind of shown that we kind of buckle down on our defense,” forward Jessica Koch said. “We might not have the best shooting night, but our defense leads to our offense … That’s something we take pride in as a defense. Every night we’re not going to shoot 50 percent, but we are going to play good defense.”

Rachel Luteyn added 13 points for Western, and Alicia Bell added 10 to go along with her team leading four steals.

“I think were really a good defensive team,” Bell said. “I don’t know about tonight, we weren’t at our best. We played good defense at times, but then we had a lot of breakdowns.”

Western’s senior class has their own goal before they leave: beat every other team in the conference. After defeating the Lady Blues two weeks ago, it left only two teams, the Nebraska-Omaha Mavericks, and the Emporia State Hornets.

The Griffons take on the Mavericks Sunday at 1:30 p.m. the start of a doubleheader.

Bryce Mereness can be reached at bryce.mereness@newspressnow.com